


The Last Time He Cried

by Niji_Hitomi_Iscariot



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, Blindness, Depression, Gen, Panic Attacks, Sensory Overload, literally the moment when it hits him that he's actually blind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:35:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2167704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niji_Hitomi_Iscariot/pseuds/Niji_Hitomi_Iscariot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The price from the Gate.</p><p>It wasn’t even his fault. He hadn’t performed it willingly, and being forced through it didn’t matter to the Truth beyond. Emerging from it had been like plunging into the depths of the most personal Hell he could imagine. Nothing. No light. No darkness. No color. Even the memories were beginning to fade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Time He Cried

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a vent piece and un-Beta'd.

The last time he cried, his best friend had died. Buried and gone, the funeral over and only the woman who protected his back was there to witness it. He didn’t know if she was there this time. The burn started in the corners of useless eyes, familiar and alien all at once. The darkness around him was punctuated only by the bustle of the world beyond his bed. The fight was over, and what was left for the broken toys, trained only to fight and do nothing else. He’d always had his eye on the highest chair in the country, but what good could come from a leader who couldn’t see the world he led.

The price from the Gate.

It wasn’t even his fault. He hadn’t performed it willingly, and being forced through it didn’t matter to the Truth beyond. Emerging from it had been like plunging into the depths of the most personal Hell he could imagine. Nothing. No light. No darkness. No color. Even the memories were beginning to fade.

But he held it together. He was strong. They needed him. The bastards that had brought him to this needed to be brought down and they needed his firepower. Fullmetal. Alphonse. Riza. Jean. Fuery. Breda. Maes. He couldn’t afford to break down then. So he shoved it to the side. He ignored it.

The way it hurt. The way it twisted up inside his chest like a poison dripped into his veins and processed through his chest with every breath. Eating away at the insides of his lungs with caustic finality. Never again would he know the taste of a summer breeze without feeling the insistent burning away of his flesh. And still, never again would he inflict blindness on his enemies. He could still, in full clarity, pull up the sensation of the fluids inside of his eyes boiling away in alchemical acid. His throat still felt raw from the way he’d screamed at Truth. Declarations of innocence and defense that fell on ears as thoroughly deafened as he had been blinded.

Spat out, chewed and worthless; a ticking time bomb waiting for the right trigger.

But the rage never came.

Adrenaline drained. The dead were buried. The people calmed. And it fell. Heavy and pervasive. Silence.

Except it wasn’t silence. True silence he could have handled. No. He heard everything. The drop of a pin rattled like a thunderclap in his ears. The shift of fabric across his leg was both the dragging of a thousand pieces of sandpaper over his skin and the roar of a waterfall. The sizzle of meat in a pan was a slap across the face of dead, burning flesh strong enough to turn his stomach, and the hiss of a hundred thousand pit vipers waiting to inject still more of that corroding venom that had replaced his blood.

He shied away.

From what he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Not without his vision. He grit his teeth, hearing the footsteps approaching. He didn’t need help. He needed his sight! He felt caged. Cornered. Like a chimera in the back of a trap waiting for the final blow.

The touch of cool fingers against his forehead was enough to make him flinch. He hated it. Whoever it was said something he couldn’t comprehend because of how the fluids of his body rushed through his ears. They gave up after he didn’t answer, and he heard with infinite clarity the exact moment they left the room.

His hand jumped out as though to stop them from leaving him alone, because that was a million times worse. Because then the little sounds no one else noticed jumped out at him constantly. And no matter how he tried to block it out, he just couldn’t move beyond sensory processing. It was maddening, trapped within his own head, with no escape.

He felt something cylindrical as his fingers dropped, and in a fit of sorrow-filled anger he threw it with all of his strength. It shattered like the sound of an atomic bomb going off, and he screamed. The voices of a host of angels, his ears were bleeding, which only contributed to his internal panic. His face was wet, the tears pouring from his wide lids. His muscles strained for any hint, any sign that there was light beyond the perpetual black hole in which he’d been drowned. Fruitlessly.

It would take a miracle.

And miracles didn’t exist.


End file.
